


The One Where Sherlock Sleeps

by halloa_what_is_this



Series: Hidden Talents [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Care-taking, Gen, John is not that stupid, Sherlock blames it all on the exhaustion, but not for long, loving, sleeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 12:27:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5375159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halloa_what_is_this/pseuds/halloa_what_is_this
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Woman did bring something good with her: she helped Sherlock realise how much he likes to sleep with John next to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Sherlock Sleeps

“How...?”

John turned round to see Lestrade had stopped in the doorway, his coat still on while John’s was half off his shoulders. He looked at the heap of limbs on the floor of the sitting room like he didn’t know how to process the sight.

“You know cats?”

Lestrade looked up, then back to the floor, then up at John again.

“That’s how,” John said, hanging his coat on the nail on the door and leaned gently over the body on the floor.

“Sherlock?”

A hand twitched, bleary eyes opened, and Sherlock was awake.

“Greg’s here,” John informed him.

Sherlock raised his head a little to peer at the doorway. Lestrade greeted him with a small wave, still trying to understand how Sherlock’s upper body could be on the floor while his legs were resting on the backrest of the sofa.

“What happens?” Sherlock croaked. “What did I do?”

“Nothing. Greg just came by to tell you about a case.”

Suddenly alert, Sherlock twisted around so that his torso pointed to the same direction as his feet, untangled his legs, and was up. Lestrade handed him the manila folder he had been carrying under his arm and followed John into the kitchen, glancing at Sherlock who had sat down at the desk to rustle through the papers in the folder.

“Did he fall asleep like that?” Lestrade whispered to John who was putting the kettle on.

“Definitely not.”

“So he just fell off? And didn’t wake up?”

The kettle clicked, John poured the water in three mugs and walked back to the sitting room.

“Tea, John,” Sherlock said without looking up.

“Way ahead of you,” John lowered one of the mugs next to his elbow. He sat on the sofa, sipping his scalding tea tenderly, and leaned in towards Lestrade.

“When he falls asleep, he won’t wake up to a hand grenade. He has fallen off his bed more than a dozen times and once he landed on his wrist and still didn’t wake up. Another time he dragged his bedside lamp with him. Mrs Hudson ran up when she heard the crash and he slept right through her screaming. She thought he’d had some sort of seizure.”

Lestrade peered at him over his mug.

“But he woke up when you spoke. You only said his name and he was awake like that,” he snapped his fingers.

John sipped his own tea, loving how the warmth seemed to seep all the way to his cold toes. No wonder Sherlock fell asleep in the sitting room. There was a blizzard outside and the room was boiling hot with all the heaters on.

He shrugged.

 

 

\\\ 

John was able to wake Sherlock up every time, always by simply saying his name, but at times he felt compelled to test his abilities and decided to see if other words were useful too.

“Case,” he whispered to Sherlock currently lying flat on his stomach in his chair by the fireplace.

Sherlock did a sort of half somersault backwards and landed on his front.

John rushed to help him up, giggling to himself and apologising for the lack of case. Sherlock barely managed to glare at him before slumping on him and falling back to sleep.

John thought he deserved it and stayed on the floor until Sherlock woke up several hours later.

But when a real case appeared a week later, Sherlock was up and awake and actually standing in no time. However, jumping straight from REM sleep to solving a case did not mean he had any more energy than he had had when he went to sleep. Two hours later, case solved in record time and even Anderson and Donovan thoroughly embarrassed by how simple it had all been in the end, Sherlock was slumped on a chair in the hallway of NSY, head leaning against John’s shoulder, his mouth hanging open and half the Yard ogling as they walked past. John let them stare but drew the line at taking pictures or videos. The moment a camera or a phone appeared, he threw such an ugly glare at the culprit that they scattered to the winds with a small screech. Anderson tried twice and failed miserably both times, the latter giving immense pleasure to Sherlock who was shaken awake by Lestrade to inform him that they could go home just when Anderson hurried down the corridor and tripped on the yellow sign the cleaning lady had strategically placed in everyone’s way to warn them about slipping on the wet floor.

 

 

\\\

Four days later, after Sherlock had been on another case for 75 hours and 32 minutes, they were back at the Yard, going through the evidence again. John, slumped over the piles of papers and photographs, smiled happily when Lestrade came in with three mugs of hot coffee from the vending machine. Normally John would have said the stuff tasted like a hot version of sewage slime but now he was too tired to taste anything and was only happy to feel the caffeine make its way to his brain, waking him up.

“He in his mind palace again?” Lestrade asked, waving his styrofoam cup at Sherlock reclining in a chair, fingers pressed together and poised under his jaw.

“No, he’s asleep,” John corrected, taking another look at the photographs with his newly-awakened eyes.

“How do you know?”

A gentle groan came from Sherlock’s direction.

“That’s how,” John replied.

He walked around the table and sat on it, reached out his hand and tapped Sherlock gently on the shoulder.

“He snores?” Lestrade gaped. “If I wasn’t me and he wasn’t him, I’d say that was freaking adorable.”

“I think it’s just that because it _is_ him.” John reached out his hand again to touch Sherlock’s face. “Sherlock.”

Sherlock snapped awake, eyes wide in terror and flailing his long limbs. John was barely able to grasp his wrist before he hit the floor.

“That’ll teach you not to sleep in a chair,” he said, pulling Sherlock up.

“That’ll teach me not to sleep ever again! Are you trying to kill me?” Sherlock screamed, his voice very high-pitched.

“Don’t worry, you can’t die of shock of your flatmate tapping you on the shoulder.”

“That was my _face_ , John. Who touches my face?”

“Apparently I do.”

“My _face_ , John!” Sherlock bellowed.

John jumped up from the table, still holding Sherlock’s wrist.

“Come on, let’s get you home and to bed. You’ve looked at the evidence long enough for today.”

“I was fine in the chair,” Sherlock protested, but got up slowly.“I am not old enough to get a stiff back from sleeping in a chair. I’m not you.”

“Hush, child,” John patted his wrist and steered him towards the door. “Night, Greg. I’m sure your killer can wait for another eight hours or so.”

Lestrade, trying to hide his glee behind his now empty cup and failing miserably, waved at them as John pushed Sherlock out of the door.

“More like twelve by the way he looks. Sleep well, boys.”

Sherlock fell asleep again in the cab, his forehead pressed against the window and shaking with the movements of the car.

The flat was dark when they got there. Having jostled Sherlock out from the backseat and opened the front door, John glanced at the clock above the large mirror in the hallway.

5:25. He was pretty certain it was Sunday.

Regular people wouldn’t even be contemplating on waking up anytime soon.

John half carried, half pushed Sherlock up the stairs and dragged him into his room, Sherlock’s hand clutching his all the while. When he was clad only in his shirt and pants, John made to leave the room but Sherlock’s iron grip on his wrist stopped him. He had barely let go while John was undressing him, which, granted, had made the task a trifle difficult.

“Sherlock.”

No reply, but John knew he was only feigning sleep.

“I need my arm to go upstairs. I have to sleep too.”

Sherlock’s grip tightened, but he still pretended to sleep, letting out a soft snore to emphasise his fake slumber.

John scrubbed his free hand over his face, ruffled his hair and decided that having been awake for at least thirty hours himself he had no energy for this. Giving up, he slid off his jeans and climbed over Sherlock to the right side of the massive bed. Sherlock followed his movements, still attached to his wrist and the moment John had settled against the pillows he let out a small sigh and an actual snore mere seconds later.

 

 

\\\

So Sherlock fell asleep easily. However, for him sleep was barely interesting enough to warrant the weekly dosage of cat naps to keep himself going if there was an interesting case on. He thanked his gift for being able to fall asleep everywhere and anywhere when his body demanded at least an hour’s slumber before it allowed him to continue working, or when he was so exhausted he could barely move his limbs. Sleep was a wonderful way to shut his brain down when he needed it, but something in his unconscious shifted when John began to guard his sleep.

The first time John did this was during the Irene Adler case. Having drugged him to the eyeballs and beaten him up with the riding crop, the woman had visited him during the night, leaving an imprint of her lips against his jaw. The first thing he had thought of when he shuddered awake was not her scent lingering in the room or the aching of the bruises, but John’s very blaring absence. He had been there, Sherlock was sure of it, but now he had vanished. So he had turned around to holler his name and fallen off the bed.

John had come running, opening the door quietly, and looking at Sherlock scrambling with his bedding on the floor had asked after his well-being with a bemused smile.

After that, John’s presence became essential whenever Sherlock succumbed to exhaustion. He did not dare to start sleeping more than usual lest John’s suspicions would arise and he’d get uncomfortable. Sherlock hated to make him uncomfortable, unless it was the kind of slight teasing that made John’s ears turn bright red. No, it was the ‘Actually hurting his soul’ and the ‘Yelling and not speaking to him for a week’ or, the worst case scenario, ‘Leave and never return again’ kinds that really frightened him.

So ‘Don’t tell John’ was definitely a rule he had set for himself and which he followed meticulously.

 

Obviously he failed.

The funny thing was, when he thought about it later, that it didn’t happen after the case including a manic 35-year-old accountant waving a knife and shucking it at him so that it barely missed an artery, after which John would not take no for an answer but practically manhandled him to bed, saying he could have easily dodged the flying knife if he’d slept properly during the last week and his reflexes were actually working. Nor did it happen because he once again collapsed at the Yard, hit the back of his head against a desk after which John forced him to go to the hospital. He escaped, cursing the visiting hours that didn’t allow John to stay overnight, and stole back to Baker Street. He woke up the next morning on the sofa with John poking him sharply in the ribs.

No. It happened after frankly a shitty day chasing criminals in the rain, slipping on the remains of a dead rat and going face first into a pile of trash (this time Anderson did get his photo), and on top of everything the said forensics expert was the one to find the missing piece of evidence. Not because of his prowess in his profession but by sheer dumb luck.

So they returned to Baker Street, both soaked to the skin and Sherlock covered in dead rat and stinking of two-week-old trash. He would have been in a foul mood if he wasn’t _so damn tired_.

In the end, when John had showered the grime off him, changed him into a pair of clean pyjamas and dragged him to his bed, the words just came tumbling out of his mouth.

“Sleep with me.”

The case had lasted a week, barely important enough to warrant the loss of sleep but that was exactly what Sherlock had lost. Too much of it. His eyes were blood-shot, his face pale and his hands shook slightly as they held onto John’s arm.

“Not tired. Unlike you I did get my eight hours last night.”

Still, John took off his jumper and tucked himself in under the blankets.

“But I’ll sit next to you while you sleep.”

Sherlock mushed his face against John’s thigh and sighed deeply.

“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”

“Mrnh?”

“You don’t have to keep killing yourself by staying awake until you pass out, then ask me to sleep next to you and blame it on the grogginess. I will sleep with you if you just ask.”

“In the euphemistic sense?”

The question was very quiet, buried into John’s flesh as it was.

“In any sense you like,” John stroked Sherlock’s hair. “Just promise me to sleep regularly from now on and I in turn promise not to leave this bed while you’re in it.”

Another happy sigh came from Sherlock.

“What if I get sick?”

“Then I’ll look after you, take your temperature, stroke your hair and make you drink tea until you get better.”

“I actually like my back stroked when I’m ill.”

Sherlock sounded half asleep.

“Good to know,” John pushed his fingers deeper into his curls. “For future reference.”


End file.
